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When I was younger I was constantly wary of political discussions. This was partly my anxiety but also a feeling that I was young and inexperienced and hadn’t worked everything out yet. Looking back I get the impression that I understood things better than many and was quite needlessly anxious. I am now happy to engage in discussions and even hopeful someone will raise an argument that will make me thing again.

Looking back my family also surprise me. Half of my family are Tories and they never made the effort to explain the conservative argument to me. I just got the impression that I would get it when I was older. Yet I had always got it, it just didn’t tally with what the UK government was doing at the time.

I did grow up to be interested in science and am hopefully capable of analysing issues rigorously. Probably all scientists wake up at some point and realise that most people don’t do this. Scientists don’t decide elections, people who haven’t done the analysis do. The problem with democracy is that people elect people who make the right noises and thus satisfy people that they are on their side and understand their concerns. Sadly the modern politician is adept at creating the impression rather than being a good analyser and decision maker.

We now have the draft Brexit deal, but it seems few are happy. This was what a slim majority after a very poor debate wanted wasn’t it? It’s very confusing. I think the problem is a lack of proper analysis. A simple conclusion is reached that ‘feels right’ and if you also feel part of a majority then why look deeper?

The UK is in decline. I think it is quite natural for societies in decline to look back to the past and look for what was better in the past and what has changed to see if a beneficial tradition has been dropped. In contrast a rising society may look back and see what is now better about the society.

sometimes i think that Brexit goes somethign like this: The UK is in decline. There are more people from the rest of the EU than there used to be. Therefore the UK is in decline because of immigration from the EU. So, to reverse the decline the UK should reduce immigration from the EU, hence Brexit.

Now of course, there isn’t necessarily any connection between the two premises, so there is no logical path to the conclusion. It may very well leave to a false positive, a correlation that fits the facts, but has no real connection with them.

However if you look deeply enough there is a connection. A society that relies on importing labour for specific jobs vital to the economy is not in a sustainable position. That the Brexiteers never talk about this, suggests that they simply want the false conclusion ‘feel right’ so that they support Brexit. It’s not somethign that should happen in a healthy democracy.

The other aspect of this looking back to the past for answers is that it raises nostalgia for periods of the past. Last week was the centenary of the end of the First World War. There was a focus on how united Britain was about entering that war, how easily Britons enlisted into the armed services to fight for ‘King and Country’ in a way that is unforeseeable in modern Britain. This notion of a united Britain is appealing.

What simply galls me is that Brexit is the antithesis of promoting unity. It’s been the most divisive political issue and bringing that discussion into the open has been damaging to British society. The EU is by no means perfect and I’ve always argued for a looser set of arrangements, however the EU is not the cause of what ails Britain, the Brexit argument is a false positive. A genuinely united nation which works towards the goal of re-building British society is the alternative and all this Brexit division and mess is just a distraction form the real work the UK needs to embark upon. The Brexiteers have scapegoated those whom oppose them as the problem, it’s a form of fascism. They who are wealthy enough to not be bothered about a decline in the British economy.

We need to re-build democracy from the bottom up and this is very much not what the chief proponents of Brexit want, they haven’t even bothered to make any sort of case for how to improve Britain outside of the EU. We need more people to look beyond the first simple answer that at first glance appears to address the problem and ‘feels right’. The world is much more complicated than that and we simply need genuine politicians who care about the whole of the economy and society who are not simply populists or public relations experts.

Today saw the results of the 2018 contest for leadership of Plaid Cymru, my political party. Basically there were three candidates, the leader, Leanne and two challengers, Adam and Rhun. Adam Price won the ballot and is now the party’s leader. I didn’t know what to expect so I’ll vent my spleen here.

I do feel a sense of disappointment as I voted for Leanne as I feel she is the right person to lead this party at the current time. I’ve met Leanne several times and perhaps feel disappointment and an empathy with her ‘loss’.

The Welsh national movement has for many years had the problem of not making the breakthrough with the people of Wales I believe we should be. Plaid Cymru’s message is simple: Decisions about Wales should be made in Wales for the benefit of all the people of Wales. Wales is the poorest region in Northern Europe because Wales is governed by the UK government which has neglected the Welsh economy. Run the Welsh economy for the benefit of Wales and everyone who lives in Wales will be better of, it’s that simple.

However their are barriers to getting this message through are barriers in people’s heads. A principal barrier being that Plaid Cymru is the party for Welsh speakers and the Welsh speaking community. Another is the idea that Wales will never get to govern itself, so why bother seeking it. I’ve been a member of this party since I was nineteen and for most of that time not a Welsh speaker, though I now am! [Unrhywun sy’n medru dysgu Cymraeg] Hence I know what it is like to be Welsh and not speak Welsh and to be Welsh and speak Welsh. I know about the language barrier, as I felt it myself for many years and then grew through it to realise that no such barrier exists, that it is all in our own heads.

Leanne’s great strength is that she understands this barrier and knows how to break it down through listening to people. Whilst Plaid Cymru may not have many more votes now than before, I believe Leanne’s work is a longer term project of breaking down those barriers and showing that Wales can be an open inclusive nation and that Plaid Cymru are the only party that will deliver it, that does take time. You can’t persuade everyone with one impassioned speech or one killer argument. That work was developing and I’m concerned that the party may be taking a step backwards in losing Leanne’s leadership. Much of the leadership debate seemed to concern whom was able to reach out to the most potential supporters. The difficulty with personalities is that any individual can naturally appeal to some people, particularly people like them but rub other people up the wrong way. There are people who don’t like Leanne, but the difference was she focused on getting the message through to all sorts for people, which others have failed to do.

I’m also concerned about a return to squabbling amongst ourselves, rather than focus on getting the core message across to everybody in Wales. Sometimes there seems to be people this issue of people wanting to get people from their part of Wales into positions of authority, or people from their zone on the political spectrum. I have always felt that this doesn’t and shouldn’t matter, we want a united Wales. We’d like a United Britain and indeed Europe in fact, but we realise that to get a strong economy and society you need to start from the bottom up and we can build a Wales where every part is treated fairly and equally. So it’s far far more important to concentrate on winning support for a self-governing independent Wales, than having a leader that represents us as individuals. The work of deciding which policy is best can be done once we have achieved the ability to implement those policies. An analogy is that it’s more important to be able to choose which colour you want the passport to be, than it is to support a particular colour for it. I’ve always felt that Plaid Cymru is a pragmatic party, looking for evidence based solutions for the challenges we have in Wales, whether the ideas come from the right, left, centre or behind.

I just really hope I’ve got this wrong. I hope that Adam is able to reach out to more and more people and continue to get our message through to more people so this movement can continue to grow and I’m sure he can. The leadership election is over. Adam is now our leader, I still like him and it is time to unite behind him and step up our work of making Wales an even better country to work rest and play in. Felly, Llongyfarchiadau Adam a pop lwc!

My car died recently. This meant I was unable to get to work so had to buy another one soonest. normally I have taken the time to ask around and do some research on what sort of cars would be best for me. This time I didn’t and instead just went to garages and looked at what was available.

I am not a car person. There seem to be a lot of car people who are interested in geeky performance data, gadgets, that supposed status their car choice projects etc. For me a car is simply a relatively cheap and convenient way of getting around. I did survive for three years without one once, which was great [see my ramblings on small towns], but I need one to get to work at the moment so i’m stuck with the expense of having one.

For me the process of buying a car is entering into the strange world of buying a product that is not marketed at people like me at all. I have this experience a lot. I’m mostly vegetarian, I’m still not into fashion, have eclectic taste in music and books. Retailers are simply not designed for the likes of me. My life has always been finding the stuff i want around the edges of contemporary consumer culture.

Being such a way has it’s advantages. Often certain facets of things command a premium price, that apparently people are prepared to pay more for things with these facets. So when you are not looking for these things, your selection criteria often isn’t price related. It’s strange that items with the criteria you want appear across the price range from the top price items to the bargain bin.

Once I needed a desk chair, it’s the one I’m sitting on right now. There are hundreds of different desk chairs available on the market. There was no shop nearby for me at the time so I went online to office chair websites with a plethora of choice, yet i found that it wasn’t even possible to search for the criteria I was interested in. I had to click on every ruddy chair and read the smallest print to get the information. I did get a very cheap chair which has what I needed, but there was little convenience in finding it.

People often describe me as fussy. I suppose I am, but really I just seem to have a different set of criteria to anyone else, though this writing probably does give the impression that I am some chair obsessed maniac.

My criteria for chairs and indeed cars is simply this. I like to seat comfortably, there I’ve said it. We spend hours sitting on chairs, so having comfortable ones to me is the most important thing. Yet you go to a shop and look at the trendy top price designer chairs , they are not that comfortable. They may look cool and have various other features, but they are not very important to me.

So, when buying a car, by far the most important criteria is a comfortable driving seat. I often drive for two to three hours, sometimes longer, so being able to sit in comfort and arrive at my destination with the minimum amount of tiredness is the most important thing. I have always bought ten year old cars, largely because I’m not rich, but also because comfort levels in cars are getting lower. This is largely because cars have lots of safety features and furthermore styling, reducing comfort. Alert unstressed drivers are generally safer drivers, but it seems we have an industry which doesn’t regard this as important. I am in that 5-10% of people for whom comfort is important, but catering for this market, isn’t important when a motor manufacturer can secure far more sales promoting some other feature. Have you ever seen a car advertisement where comfort features?

As I said, I am not a car person. I kind of get it as there are things that are important to me. Apparently i am a little bit of a Hi-Fi geek. The numbers on bits of Hi-Fi have meaning for me. I can get into a long geeky conversation with someone else into Hi-Fi. I like music and can appreciate when music sounds more like the performers are live in my room, rather than muffled and distorted. There are also car geeks, but there enough of them to influence the marketplace. Sadly Hi-Fi geeks are fairly rare these days. People have been happy to listen to low quality playback of music, if the device has other features that they like. Most people listen to music on their phones, either from files compressed to hell to fit enough onto the device or streamed. I do this too, but it’s just yucky.

It’s so sad that people spend so much of their lives stuck in their cars in traffic just doing ordinary things like grocery shopping. We have clogged up roads, burning fossil fuels like there is still no tomorrow and don’t even do this is comfort. It’s madness. I’m so looking forward to when I can live somewhere without a car again. The governments of the world have woken up to this rather late and are trying to reduce car use. My problem with this is that it is all stick and no carrot. It’s just extra taxes on the poor and no investment in a better solution.

It is more taxes on the poor. The rich can afford the latest electric cars which have lower taxes and can afford to live centrally near public transport hubs. They could use public transport, but usually don’t as they have invested a lot of money in a car and they have one of the cleanest cars in terms of emissions on the road. Conversely the poor live, live away from the hubs, so need cars to get to work and do everyday life. The poor also have older more polluting cars. Yet the taxes are on the older cars, like mine, of people who don’t have a choice, yet not on the rich who can use/afford public transport.

Investing in public transport would help, especially if they had comfortable seats. Really car manufacturers only need to keep their seats more comfortable than public transport. Yet on public transport the seat comfort is also lowering. It just feels like a conspiracy sometimes. It’s not the solution though, it’s enabling people to be housed where all their everyday needs are walkably close by and in large towns and cities there is a decent, affordable spokes to the centre transit system.

Instead as a society investment is thrown at the car gadgets as this makes the manufactures richer, rather than investing to make society better. My new car has cruise control. It is the first car I’ve ever had with it. Probably when it was new this was a feature that helped someone decide to buy it. However I drive in Wales, along our windy hilly roads, where by the time you’ve set the cruise control you need to break or change gear for a steep hill, it’s like a little toy to play with on long journeys, but no use as an actual foot rest. The only time they are useful is on long straight roads, the motorways, but I don’t do that often, though I can understand the advantage of being able to rest your right foot for a bit on long journeys. I now have an ugly grey car, with styling the complete opposite of my personality, but i don’t care because it’s comfortable and I can drive two to three hours in a reasonable degree of comfort.

The biggest thing that struck me having just returned from a holiday to Rome, Italy was the food. I’ve been eating the best pasta, pizzas and probably far too much ice cream, the ice cream was amazing, so many interesting flavours to try. I’ve also been noticing a completely different cultural attitude to food. I did go to Rome and wanted to see the sights, which meant being in very touristy areas much of the time, yet feel i was still able to have a brief glimpse into a very different world. Italians love food in a way that the British don’t. The difference seems to be finding out where is good, rather than the British attitude of where is okay.

I think there is a hugely different general mindset at play. The Welsh are sometimes described as people who don’t like to make a fuss, whereas the Italian understands the importance of making a fuss, of not tolerating avoidable crap. Generally, we don’t eat out very often in Wales, when we do it’s either out of the necessity of being away from home or to celebrate a special occasion with friends. We kind of accept that food will often not be that great, but have developed ways to not let this spoil our time. We kind of have the attitude that we are sure the cooks are doing their best, but are just not very good and that we shouldn’t blame them for that. We may even go back to the same establishment if it wasn’t too bad. I don’t think the Italian would do this, they would make it clear that the food was not up to standard and never go back. Essentially in Britain we have fewer ways of maintaining standards of good food.

Even in the supermarkets though the food is good. There are only small sections of crap processed food, whereas in Wales our supermarkets are mainly full of crap and finding the good stuff is more of a challenge.

Coffee is of course a big thing in Italy. It is difficult to find anywhere that does bad coffee. It’s also reasonable priced: 90c for an espresso or €1.50 for a cappuccino, provided you take it at the bar and not pay double for ‘table service’, compared to £1.50 for an espresso and around £2.30 for a cappuccino. Britain is just crazy, yet the interesting thing is the absence of the big international coffee chain cafes in Italy. The reason being that the chains could not compete with the independents or Italian chains.

I think that this is because of a different attitude in the countries. I get the impression that Italians take a pride in providing a service, of providing good food and drink to make their customers happy, rather than purely driven by profit. whereas in Britain there often isn’t this pride and the food sector is viewed purely as financial interactions. So if a business can get away with lower quality and hence reduced costs, then they will.

I love independent shops, they are more interesting and provide greater diversity. However so often in Britain some independents don’t care about service, whilst others do. Local people will support a good independent business, however some people and often seems to be the majority, don’t care about quality and will use poorer local businesses if more convenient. In Britain we seem to prefer convenience to quality. The difficulty for independents is that visitors have no idea which independents are good and which are not. The good independents will generally not be on the main shopping street as they can’t afford the high rents, so struggle. Then when the chain coffee shops came they dominated as the visitors like the chains as they know that the product won’t be too bad (better than a bad independent. Basically we are too tolerant of rubbish and we should be more Italian about food and drink.

When I was in Napoli (Naples), where there were a lot fewer tourists I got a lot more of a taste of the real Italy. Food was cheaper and generally better quality. Perhaps the less demanding tourists allow some drop in quality in the touristy parts of central Rome. It may be partly due to the warm climate, but Italians do seem to enjoy going out and eating out when they can. Instead of eating at home and then going out to drink, Italians go out to eat and drink. There seems to be more cultural mixing in Italy, rather than people settling in into their favoured pub, with a clientele similar to themselves, which is what happens in Wales. In Napoli whole families socialise out in the streets and seem to establish long term relations ships with the establishments they particularly like.

Part of second language learning is re-exploring your first language. Through this re-exploration you come to better understand your first language, in my case English. Furthermore you start to explore how certain words and phrases have a distinctive cultural meaning away from the standard dictionary definition. Sometimes i find it very strange when second language English speakers start to experiment using these cultural expressions, it’s often very funny. I’m sure I am making some very amusing sentences in my Welsh.

A word I commonly use and was a frequent word used within my family when I was growing up was ‘posh’. However i use it slightly differently to the standard definition. My use is widely understood in Wales, but when I travel I have found it isn’t so.

The standard definition is that posh means luxurious, cultured, refined, of the upper class. However my definition is a nuanced version of this definition, with posh as needless, but enjoyable adornment, or affected ostentation.

I was driving a new car last week which had one of those automatic handbrakes, ‘how posh’ I thought. There is no need for an automatic handbrake, when new to using them it is fun to explore how it works, hence posh. Once you have got used to it it is no longer posh [my definition]. However if they remain a feature of ‘luxury cars’, then they become part of posh driving [standard definition].

Perhaps it is better explained with cups. We have a tradition of posh cups which have exquisite patterning and shape to be used with saucers of a Sunday afternoon or when we have guests around for tea. The idea is that these cups are ‘for best’ or to honour special occasions.There is a whole set of rituals involving their use, which is very enjoyable when you enter into the spirit of it. For me it is just wrong to make tea with bags to be put into posh cups. If you are going to the trouble of using the posh cups, you should also make the effort to make the best tea, which involves teapots and loose tea.

I wouldn’t use these cups for everyday as they would lose their special value, they would no longer be posh by my definition, but would remain posh. For me posh is the fun of using a pointless ostentation for the sheer fun of it. for me, the idea of using posh things everyday is just a waste. I regard it as a token of a developing friendship when you can visit someone and not be given the posh cups, but are graced with the everyday, more relaxed cups.

Thinking about it, this posh cultural tradition is dying out, people rarely pop around for tea anymore as friends and family live ever further apart geographically. My parents and grandparents generation were given several posh tea sets when they got married and everyday tea sets by their close friends. They carefully stored these tea sets, away in the attic, but keeping an everyday set and a best/poshest set. As wedding gifts they were highly valued and usually the very best set was stored away, maybe to be got out if the Queen happened to pop around.

A friend of mines mam recently decided to tidy up her attic and got down box after box of tea sets. A tea set being a posh teapot, a posh cake stand, tea plates, cups, saucers and a sugar bowl [though why anyone would befoul tea with sugar is beyond me]. She was minded to get rid of them, however, there are thousands of these tea sets in peoples attics, you can’t even give them away to charity shops for the shops have so many, they are ‘too good’ [posh] to be thrown away and too posh to use as everyday cups. So she carefully cleaned them, wrapped them up and put them all safely back into boxes and returned them to the attic, ‘you can deal with them when I am gone’ she said. I get this, my fathers attic is also full of various posh tea sets and I remember well how much value was placed on them by my parents and grandparents, they could remember who had bought them each particular tea set even after fifty years. My point is that these posh things have no monetary value, posh is not equivalent to expensive or good quality, as I said, it”s needless adornment for special occasions.

The thing is that people and especially children break tea sets. I have smashed a fair few in my time, this is fine and they become chipped and worn through use anyway. So when a tea set loses it’s posh value it is thrown away to be replaced by an exciting new tea set from the store of posh tea sets. Some tears are shed for the old tea cups that have faithfully served the family for years. In my family when a tea set was changed it was such an event in the family, to change the vessels of our cups of tea to new colours and new shapes! The trouble is that a posh tea is a rare social even these days, so in the course of life, people get through a lot fewer tea sets.

These traditional Welsh tea ceremonies, with their teisen gri (Welsh cakes), posh tea sets and unfathomable family tea etiquette are not well known outside my native culture. There have been countless times when I have used the word posh and people haven’t grasped what I was saying. It’s only now, reflecting on my English that I notice such these things.

I haven’t found a standard definition of posh to refer to special occasions. Regular use of posh things, or visiting ‘posh’ places quickly lose their value with over-use and even so, you would miss out on all fun and diversity of everyday things. There are ‘posh people’ who are wealthy enough to use posh things everyday, but they have posher things for their special occasions. There are also those ‘trying to be posh’; who purposely buy and use posh things everyday to create some false mark of class. However these more standard uses are quite removed from my use of posh.

The things have the quality of being posh as a noun, but poshness is relative. When somethign is used on those rare occasions it is posh in use, as a verb. But with overuse, it loses its value as different to the everyday and is no longer posh in use.

It is difficult to understand a language from books. It is through listening to lived experiences of the subtleties and nuances of language that deeper meanings can be appreciated. However, when I looked up the Welsh word for posh in a dictionary, it came out with ‘swanc’ much like the English word ‘swank’. Swanc just sums up my understanding of posh perfectly. That posh/swanc is a relative term for occasional ostentatious behaviour.

Often on this blog I’ve highlighted the importance of diversity, that we as humans are all different and we have differing needs, that one size fits all approaches never work. So, I wish to discuss a very disturbing recent development with cars, that has failed to respect diversity.

In recent times there has been a trend towards ever brighter lights on cars. I used to think that it was just a few modders not considering other motorists, but they seem to have become standard on many new cars. I am talking about Xenon and LED lighting.

The idea behind these lights is that they are more energy efficient (which is great) and enable the driver to see more with there headlights (which by itself is also a good thing). However such lights dazzle other road users. Technically this is illegal:

UK Highway Code Rule 114

use any lights in a way which would dazzle or cause discomfort to other road users, including pedestrians, cyclists and horse riders

However this rule is as far as I am aware never enforced and there is no upper brightness limit in law, so dazzle is defined as being subjective. So if I experience dazzle then technically a vehicle with these lights is illegal. Yet nothing is being done about this!

It’s all of the lights on a car thus fitted, which does cause problems:

Headlights

More powerful headlights allow the driver to see more and may decrease some accidents. There has always been the problem of headlights at night causing reduced visibility to on coming drivers and drivers have developed strategies to cope with this. However when the brightness is increased the danger of decreased visibility to other drivers is increased which may increase accidents. There is a balance to be achieved here. However there is no mechanism in place to ensure the safest balance is achieved.

Day Running Lights

What is the point of these, other than to dazzle other drivers? They offer the driver no increased clarity, merely decrease other drivers vision.

Rear Running Lights

These are essential at night so other drivers are can be aware of other active vehicles. However, dazzling the car behind doesn’t help anyone. Most rear running lights are not too bright until brakes are applied

Rear Brake Lights

Perform the vital role of signaling following drivers of braking, that the car is slowing down and that the driver may have spotted a hazard ahead. However id they are too bright, as many of them are now, they dazzle the following drivers, causing them to be able to see less, which has no advantages.

Stationary Brake Lights

When I learnt to drive, the importance of Handbrake – Neutral was drummed into me. This action switches off the rear brake lights, mainly for safety in a collision but also to stop dazzling the driver behind.

Now, sometimes, we are lazy and we hold our cars on the foot brake. This didn’t cause dazzle problems for most people as the lights were not overly bright and on older models of cars the lights were lower down on the car body, more importantly below eye height, so the light wasn’t directly in the centre of the field of vision. This is an increasing problem as most drivers where I live have dropped the Handbrake – Neutral action when stopped temporarily and more worryingly some modern cars which switch the engine off to save fuel when stationary keep the rear brake lights burning holes in following drivers retinas, well give us sun spots anyway. The problem with this is that the following drivers eyes adjust to the bright light, so for a while afterwards their vision is dimmed, which has safety consequences.

So how did we get to a point where new cars are not designed to be safe?

Part of the issue is that we are all different and have different light sensitivity. I raised this issue with friends and colleagues and most people don’t find these brighter lights dazzling or a problem, even though their vision is still dimmed. However I realised that I am not alone, there seems to be a significant minority of people who are more light sensitive, for whom brighter lights are more dangerous.

Remember we are all different and even see the world in different ways. For example, I didn’t realise quite how prevalent various forms of colour-blindness are. So the needs of the light sensitive should be taken into account when designing and regulating cars on the roads.

There doesn’t seem to be any action on this front. I wrote to the government and they are not even looking into this issue. The difficulty is that the car manufacturers lobby governments for minimal regulations, as surely the market will regulate for safety as it is what drivers want.

However, in this case, market forces don’t work. If your car dazzles others it doesn’t affect you as driver, all you see is your slight improvement in visibility, the negative effect is suffered by other road users. But other road users have zero influence on your choice of car and it’s lighting. Having a really bright car that is more noticed may mean that there is a decreased chance of other people running into you, however when all cars are overly bright this advantage is lost and everyone is left with overly bright cars and the roads are overall less safe places.

It is simply dangerous to not consider the needs of others, especially when no wider advantage makes up for the loss of a particular minority. Everyday I witness inconsiderate driving that may cut a few seconds off someones journey only to slow down everyone else. What is more disturbing is when these issues are built into the cars themselves.

There is a potential solution. Driving spectacles have been developed to reduce light glare. Basically they have a yellow tint which filters out the UV/ blue light spectrum which reduces headlight dazzle. I’ll have to check these out!

This is perhaps the craziest general election the UK has yet had. Never before have we seen such swings in opinion polls during the six week campaign period. Never before has support swung around Labour and the Conservatives, making it seem like a really binary choice again. It has also been another election to decide an internal matter about the EU within the Conservative regime.Yet it is again a negative campaign, stoking a fear of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour against a fear of Theresa May’s Conservatives. The mantra has always been towards me to vote Labour to get the Tories out for the sake of the country, no matter how poor the Labour party is So often British democracy has failed it;’s people and returned woeful UK government.

The difference this time is Corbyn. On one side there is not another slick soundbite machine or voice of a professional PR unit. Corbyn is a genuine principled politician, who only accidentally ended up as leader of his party and that is very rare these days. Yet he is a leader of a party so blinded by the mantra of electioneering that they have not supported their own leader.

In England there is no alternative, so if you live in England, vote Labour.

However we have an alternative in Wales in Plaid Cymru. A party with principles and a good leader. The Labour party in Wales has not delivered for Wales and have not supported Corbyn against the the far greater threat of continued Tory misrule. In Wales we can vote for a united principled party that has the best interests of all of this nation at heart, not just the bits that happen to historically have backed the Labour party. A vote for Plaid Cymru, isn’t a compromise of settling for keeping the harmful Tories out, but a vote for a positive outward looking future.

I know not everyone is convinced yet and in Britain we are so used to this voting for the least bad evil. This needs to change too. We desperately need a proportional voting system, to enable government to get decisions right, to find a working consensus, to not leave minority groups decide on future direction.

This is what the party stands for. Not seeking separation or division for the sake of it [?], but to tackle the systemic problem of why our government always gets things wrong. To seek change that will change the system for good so we get the right decisions for our communities and our economy. That does mean greater autonomy for the Welsh government, but also greater accountability. It means electoral reform. It means a return to looking at how wealth is created by our society, rather than as a product of diminishing society.

In the UK in the last decade there has been growth in GDP of the UK economy. However, the people of the UK (apart from a small capitalised elite) have seen our spending power fall. The proceeds of growth are not being fairly shared. We need to change this. The political system is not delivering for the people of Britain, yet this is precisely the role of the political system.

In a democracy, if you want change, you should vote for it, rather than accept an unhappy compromise of things perhaps not being as bad as they could have been. We need to look for positive change.

TO give a practical example. The health service. The NHS in Wales is not efficient, because it has no spare money to invest for the future. It’s inefficient because it employs agency staff as doctors and nurses at a higher hourly rate than those directly employed within the Health Service. These health care workers travel long distances to get to where they are needed each day.

The solution to this is not to stump up more cash to maintain this system, but to change it. If we can train more Doctors and Nurses in Wales, then the number of potential Doctors and Nurses in Wales will increase. If those workers then find they can live a comfortable existence and raise families, they will stay in the areas where there skills are required. The problem has been that there has been no investment in staff or future staff provision. Importing workers from outside of Wales, at great cost, instead of investing for long term sustainability. Of course trained staff are free to go and work wherever they want to, however we shouldn’t perpetuate a system where such workers feel they have to move elsewhere to work even if they don’t really want to.

Regular readers of this blog, they will know how much i write about the perils of seeing things in binary terms. It is just two overly simplified ends of an issue. If the other end exists, then this one end can never be wholly right. The question is always about finding that fluctuating balance point somewhere along the line. Binary political systems where you have to vote a specific way to keep the other lot of extremists out is just wrong. You should always be able to vote for your first preference without doing so risking your worst option getting in.

The level of debate, spin and misinformation at this election has been appalling. As indeed it was for Brexit. Surely, now is the time for some form of proportional voting system, to save the UK from itself. How much longer must we choose between two parties we don’t like.

The recent swing towards Labour in the polls and the big squeeze on support for the other parties has put me for the first time in my voting life in a marginal seat. This time it may make a difference which of the two binary options I vote for or if I choose to vote another way. The other way being a kind of rejection of the choice of a lesser of two evils.

It is a dilemma. Elections should be about building a national consensus, not dividing the country between two extreme visions and leaving one lot of extremists in total control for 5 years, a tyranny of a minority group. What else is this election but a battle between polar opposites for the moderate voter and the non-political voter. Of course neither of these two parties want to discuss proportional voting systems because they’d rather have the opportunity of power, which a big part of the problem and why modern electoral systems strive to prevent one party tyranny. There is massive support for proportional voting in political circles, it is what the UK needs more than anything, more than Brexit, more than reducing net immigration, because it allows a country to use democracy to make the right decisions, build consensus and start making the right decisions and allowing for real long term investment in the future, to not leave one specific type of people in charge, we need government to work for everybody

The whole UK election process is very disheartening. I do favour Corbyn much more than May, even if only because he does honestly answer questions, rather than avoid them and change their view from one day to the next. We do need the Tories out of ultimate power based on minority support. It would be nice for someone with principles to lead the country, rather than yet another political careerist. Corbyn is coming from the right place, broadly he wants to fix the worst aspects of the UK economy, and he does seem to be prepared to compromise on areas where his views are not well supported. So if you do live in England, vote Labour!

Of course we in Wales, as in Scotland, have another choice, other parties to vote for, who believe in the importance of consensus for society in general. So if you are in Wales, vote Plaid Cymru on Thursday.